Page 78 of Crazy In Love (Secrets of Suburbi 3)

His ears twitched up but he stayed exactly where he was. Eyes closed and all.

Noah came barreling into the kitchen with a terrifying scowl on his face that didn’t match the joy of his costume in the slightest.

I opened the door behind me successfully, but I couldn’t leave without Snuggle Muffins. I refused to.

Noah reached me and slammed the door closed. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” He kept his hands on either side of me, caging me in.

And in a flash I saw my husband again. Angry and cruel. I cowered beneath him. Waiting for the sharp pain of his palm hitting my skin. But it didn’t come in.

Because he wasn’t my husband. He was… I looked back up at him. “Who are you?” He was too close to me. He looked too similar. And my mind loved to play tricks on me when it came to my husband.

“Are you kidding me? You knew I wasn’t Noah this whole freaking time?” He took a step back and ran his fingers through his dyed hair. “You’ve been calling me Noah for days. You had me believing I was your husband after you knocked me unconscious. All of this could have been cleared up a lot earlier if you didn’t keep acting like I was your husband. Messing with my head. You had me believing everything.”

And I just stood there staring at him. “You know you’re not Noah?” Part of me had been playing along with him being my husband. It had been so easy to get lost in that fantasy. To hope. To believe I hadn’t done something terrible.

“I didn’t realize the truth until this morning. I was looking all over the place trying to piece together what happened. Trying to figure out why the hell I couldn’t remember my own family.”

Family. He thought we were a family. Wasn’t that all I’d ever wanted to be? Part of a family?

I looked past him into the ransacked family room.

I knew he had been searching for something. But I had no idea he was trying to piece together his past. Or that I’d confused him into thinking he was actually my husband. When he was confusing me back by acting like my husband. And having my husband’s face. We’d done the ultimate role-play, all completely by accident.

“And when I found your phone, with all those appointments with Dr. Collins, I lost it. You’d been saying I was cheating on you. When really it seemed like you were the one cheating on me.”

I nodded. All the Dr. Collins notes in my calendar were just me tailing my husband. Trying to figure out where he was going. Where he was at all times. “But then I mentioned Sophia. And her face looking like mine.” I remembered his hands falling from my skin. The angry look on his face. I thought he was angry with me. But…that must have been when he remembered the truth. That he wasn’t Noah.

He nodded.

“You remember now?” I asked.

“I remember everything,” he said.

I swallowed hard. I didn’t. I knew most of it, but there were still blurry parts. It had been so long since I’d been able to think clearly. “If you’re not my husband, then who are you?”

“I work for him.” That was all he offered.

I’d been to his office before. No one there had his face. I shook my head. “I know all of his employees.”

“His other business. Ensley, your husband was doing illegal procedures.” He grabbed the files he’d tried to show Detective Torres. “Like this.”

I opened the first file. It was medical records for a man named Aiden Brown. The man looked a little like my husband. I turned the page. There were sketches outlining a reconstruction procedure. The shaving down of his jaw. Tweaks to his nose. Even changes to his ears. The final effect was a picture of a man that almost looked identical to my husband. I looked up. “You’re Aiden?”

He nodded and handed me another file. This one was for a woman who looked a little like me.

The sketches of the procedures were on the next page. And on the next…a woman that looked so eerily like me that you could easily mistake us as the same person. Or was it me? I touched my cheek. Was I this woman? I wanted to claw my skin off. “Is this me?”

He grabbed my hand, his touch comforting. “No. That’s Sophia Tremblay. Your replacement.”

“My what?”

“It all came back to me this morning. When you said Sophia looked like you. That she had been beaten up. This woman.” He stabbed a finger at Sophia’s face. “She’s your replacement.”

I shook my head. Replacement?

“You knew that, Ensley. You knew your husband was cheating on you. It’s why you kidnapped me.”

I shook my head. I did know that. But this? The files felt heavy in my hand. He put my face on another woman. To steal my money. To leave me. That was insane. But I also believed it. Because for months I’d been suspicious that my husband had a doppelgänger. He’d tried to erase the memories. Swearing he was just cheating and that he’d stop. Promising it wasn’t true. But this was what he’d been doing behind closed doors. Creating monsters.

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